alt Hacker News> Cars do not strictly have higher capabilities than horses.
Another way to see it: A horse (or any animal) is a goddamn nanobot-swarm with a functioning hivemind that is literally beyond human science in many important ways. Unlike a horse:
* Your car (nor even half of them) does not possess a manufacturing bay capable of creating additional cars.
* Your car does not have a robust self-repair system.
* Your car does not detect strain its structure and then rebuild stronger.
* Your car does not synthesize its fuel from a wide variety of potential local resources.
* Your car does not defend itself by hacking and counter-hacking attacks other nanobots, or even just by rust.
* Your car does not manufacture and deploy its own replacement lubricants, cooling fluid, or ground-surface grip/padding material.
* Your car is not designed to survive intermittent immersion in water.
In both a feature-list and raw-computation sense, we've discarded huge amounts in order to get a much much smaller set that we care more about.
The car isn’t intelligence.
Not sure why you are implying cars outdid horses intelligence.
Cars are a product of our minds. We have all those self-repair abilities, and we have more intelligence than a horse.
But horses intelligence didn’t let them keep up with what the changing environment, changed by us, needed. So there are less horses.
The rate that horse or human bodies are improving, or our minds, despite human knowledge still advancing, is very slow compared to advances in machines designed specifically for advancement. Initially to accelerate our own advancement.
Now the tech, that was designed to accelerate tech, is taking on a life of its own.
That is how foundational advances happen. They don’t start ahead, but they move ahead because of new advantages.
It is often initially much simpler. But in ways that unlock greater potential.
Machines are certainly much simpler than us. But, much easier to improve and scale.
You recognize the new thing even before it dominates, because in a tiny fraction of the time the old system got to where it is, the new system is already moving much much faster.
If general AI appears before 2047, it will have taken less than 100 years to grow from the first transistor.
People will see it who are older than the first transistor!
Nothing on the planet has ever come close to that speed of progress. From nothing to front runner. By many many many orders of magnitude.